Castelvetros Theory Of Poetry

Author : H. Charlton
Publisher : CreateSpace
ISBN 13 : 9781515072713
Total Pages : 238 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (727 download)

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Download or read book Castelvetro's Theory of Poetry written by H. Charlton and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2015-07-14 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The mentality of Lodovico Castelvetro has been -the subject of continuous admiration from his own time to the present. There has been less willingness since the time of Vico to credit him with much else. De Sanctis, who read him a half century and more ago, did not reconstitute his personality. From America, in fact, came, in the work of Spingarn, the first definite appreciation of Castelvetro's real distinction. Croce, Cavazzuti, Bertoni, Vivaldi, and Trabalza have taken up successively his case. To-day we may say that his work is present in all essential traits before us. As a commentator on Aristotle's "Poetics," Castelvetro stands out in modern times with Butcher and St. Hilaire. In certain details he sees the real import of Aristotle's ideas more clearly than Aristotle himself; in every respect he has a juster notion of the "Poetics" than all of his contemporaries. In aesthetic theory itself Castelvetro's case seems irretrievable. He never attained to solid fundamental principles; he fluctuates and gropes, showing moments of keen vision and moments of absurdity. Here he is extraordinarily interesting, and that is all, in relation to many specific problems of literary history. When we pass to philology, on the other hand, the situation is different. It is not enough to recognize him as the greatest of his period; he leads in this department not only his own age, but all before the rise of modern philological science in the nineteenth century. At the base of his method lie the two foundations of phonetics and, in morphology, of analogy. Leaving aside the capricious guesses of his contemporaries in. etymology, he lays Vulgar Latin at the basis of Romance studies, and proceeds with a comparative method and with the same categories that are in use to-day. This, in brief, is what was known of Castelvetro. And with much of this Mr. Charlton is, at the outset, unfamiliar. In biography, this distinguished English critic has not gone beyond Muratori; the philological phase of Castelvetro he overlooks entirely. To be sure, as the title of this volume indicates, the author's principal interest is in the aesthetics, and this one aspect of Castelvetro is treated more comprehensively than in any similar work in English. The extensive discussion centres attention on certain points only cursorily noted before, as by Spingarn and Croce. If Castelvetro had no notion of the expressive nature of art, he was original in his time in substituting pleasure for didacticism as the function of poetry, and his hedonism has a superficial if not a radical democratic outlook. He was original, too, in seeing the futility of classic imitation in literature; and thus coming back to the insistence on original invention in art, he was at the threshold of real discovery, only to lose himself in the problem of "historicity" and fantasy, of "beautiful" and "ugly," and in details of perceptual formalism. Mr. Charlton lays great stress on the conception of artistry as the "difficulté vaincue," with which principle he associates all of Castelvetro's rational point of view on art. We would not enter with the English critic into the detailed refutation of this position. The fact is that Castelvetro, like all of his age, and like nine-tenths of our own, considers aesthetics exclusively from the point of view of the audience and never from that of the producer. The question of what is pleasing and how to please is largely a question of social psychology; the mystery will yield only to empirical research. If at this point artistic "technique" enters, very well. We dare say that the rankest perceptualism in art may have a good financial basis, even a good sociological basis. In any case, those are problems not for the æsthetician. It is well to bear this in mind in dealing with the theorists of the Renaissance.... -The Nation, Volume 99 [1914]